Jan-Piet Mens

The Urban dictionary defines Vistaster as:

Yeah; a pretty good definition.

via

Photo: Tomas Rücker

We use Inkscape for the diagrams in the book and keep them as SVG of course, but for inclusion in LaTeX, they have to be transformed to EPS.

Instead of trying to remember to save a copy in EPS format from within Inkscape, I've automated that task by periodically running an svn update command, followed by a make (with a nifty Makefile). I would have liked to do that in a post-commit hook, but you aren't allowed to modify Subversion's transactions.

Now, if only I'd thought of that months ago…

If you want to start with TeX and LaTeX on Mac OSX, I recommend the MacTeX Distribution, which supplies virtually all you need to start with in a single installer.

The bundle includes TeXShop a simple, yet practical GUI in which you write LaTeX and produce PDF at the click of a button.

Accessing WikiPedia is easy when you're online, but have you ever wanted to take it along with you for off-line situations? I have, and there is a lovely program to do so for Windows: WikiTaxi. You don't have to install the program; just extract it from its 7zip archive and put it in a convenient location somewhere on your Windows drive.

After downloading one of the page dumps from Wikimedia, you convert (to SQLite) the compressed page dump file (e.g. enwiki-.....-pages-articles.xml.bz2) to WikiTaxi's format with the included importer program, which takes a while: on my system the converter ran for just over an hour to translate the full WikiPedia compressed XML source (3.3GB) to WikiTaxi's format, resulting in a 5.89 GB file.

WikiTaxi is well documented, and it is fun to use. The only thing missing are WikiPedia's images, but those are difficult to acquire.

Congratulations to our friends at NLnet Labs for today's release of the Unbound name server.

Quoting myself from the press release:

We are very impressed with Unbound," said Jan-Piet Mens, author of the forthcoming book, "Alternative DNS Servers." "It is great code, very versatile, and it is the fastest caching server we tested."

If you need a caching and validating name server, get Unbound; it's worth your while (and I discuss it thoroughly in my book).

This is India. It's where you call when you have a technical problem with your computer.

[Thanks, Britta.]